Kosmix calls TweetBeat “the end of hashtags”. Because they scan all tweets being sent out for all kinds of semantic data, you no longer have to explicitly tag things with hashtag, is their stance. For example, over the past few days there have been almost 64,000 tweets about Disrupt from over 11,000 people — but only a small percentage have used the “#tcdisrupt” tag. TweetBeat found the tweets anyway.

TweetBeat scans over 90 million tweets a day to find the most interesting topics, but only shows you the best tweets about those topics. They do this by identifying the influencers for any given topic. And again, they scan the tweets themselves for semantic data. They also look at signals such as how often a tweet was retweeted or replied to.

With TweetBeat you can “follow live in real time the most interesting things are saying about any realtime event,” the company says. But you can also pause things and replay tweets from a specific moment in time. There’s a nice slider tool to track when a topic was heating up. And if you connect your Twitter account (which you don’t have to), you can easily retweet or reply to anything you see on the service.